Samurai Trails: A Chronicle of Wanderings on the Japanese High Road

by Lucian Swift Kirtland

The man had imaginative eyes. It was plain to see that he was suffering from some lively remembrance of a mountain folklore demon story. He knew that we were foxes or badgers who had assumed human form, and that we had come to him with no good intentions. He suspected a subtle poison. But he had courage from one thought. It is the common knowledge of the countryside that while the demands of demon badgers may not be directly refused, their evil intent may often be thwarted by the crafty intelligence of man. The immediate problem was how to avoid the appearance of refusing to eat the mysterious cake which was now getting soft and moist in his hand. Suddenly he popped the chocolate into his mouth, tin foil and all. Then he pushed back the square into his hand almost in the same movement. I pretended not to be watching. He dropped his hand with elaborate carelessness into the thickness of the grass. I felt a sense of dramatic relievement myself.

During those minutes the ox had been no such respecter of enchantment as had his master. Instead, he had stood sniffing at our boots and pulling up bits of grass round and about our ankles, all the time rolling a pair of red, angry eyes. Asiatic beasts of burden find something antagonistic to their complaisance in the odour of the Caucasian and this individual ox was progressing toward a positive bovine dissatisfaction. Furthermore, we were sitting on the sweetest and most tender tufts of grass remaining. We courteously dismissed the peasant to go his way. His marked alacrity was quite welcome.

We lingered on the grass for a little while and I told O-Owre-san my guesses. I elaborated them into the hazard that the poor man—he had not once turned to look back over his shoulder—might even then be fearing that the slight taste from the chocolate would turn him into a frog and his ox into a stork to eat him up; or perhaps he might be in distress that he and his beast might grow smaller and smaller until they would disappear into thin air.

O-Owre-san had been examining the faintness of the path. “I hope none of these things happen until the man gets over the hills to Narii. The hoof prints make an excellent trail,” he said.

It was time to sling on our packs and follow. When we reached the next turn we could see the peasant’s straw hat and the ox’s straw bonnet bobbing along just over the bush tops. We maintained this distance without closing the gap. As O-Owre-san had predicted, the hoof marks were useful. The path often grew so faint that it had no other resolute indication. We had been sure, without thought of other possibility, that the crest of the hill we were climbing would be the summit of the range. When we reached the crest we stood looking up at another peak rising from a shallow valley at our feet.

“Which way does the ox say to go?” I asked.

The hoof marks were there in the soft earth, but where our feet had stopped there they had stopped. They stopped as absolutely as if the peasant and his ox had been whisked away in a chariot to the sunset sky. The bushes were too low for concealment. There was no cave, nor hole in the earth.

If there be no such thing as magic, in the Japanese mountains at least, where did that man and his beast go? The disappearance was as complete as the most exacting enchanter could have desired. We found no answer to the riddle and the sun was sinking, adding the next question of how we were going to get out of the hills in the night time if we delayed for scientific investigation. We succumbed to expediency and took a five-mile-an-hour pace over such trail as we had left, guessing at the turns. When we finally reached the next crest, deep in the valley we could see Narii. Before descending the steep, dropping path, we sat down near a spring where the birds had come to drink. They were singing evening songs mightily. Bright wild flowers were scattered in the open spaces between the intense green of the fern patches. The world was lustily at peace.

When we did start we swung down the long hill almost at a run and in a half-hour reached the edge of the village to find Hori sitting under a stone lantern in the temple yard. The evening peace had made us positive that this is the best of all possible worlds, but Hori was entertaining a different idea. He looked exceedingly gloomy. We were impatient of any discontent. If he had said that men were starving for rice in the village beyond, the fitting answer would have seemed to us the historic words of the good queen: “Give them cake.” Undoubtedly when the message about the starving peasants was brought to that Lady of France she was sitting under the shrubbery at Versailles, and the birds were singing, and it was springtime, and perhaps the fountains were playing. Impellingly she realized with an insight deeper than any historian has ever appreciated that upon such a glorious day, if there is any such thing as right or justice at all in this world, a certain amount of cake should be everybody’s inalienable possession.

As it happened, Hori’s worry had nothing to do with altruistic sorrow for starving villagers, but existed from a lively interest in our own affairs. The town was very poor, he explained, a town come down in the world from ancient prosperity. Its neck was hung with the millstone of decayed graces and thinned blood. The inn was so old that it was senile. Hori had established some excuse before entering the door for inspection which later allowed his rejection of the inn’s hospitality, but it would never do for us in turn to venture in for a glance around. That would be needlessly raising the expectation of the ancient host. We would find, he suggested, that it would be only five or six or seven miles to the next village. As we had had twenty-five or more miles behind us and most of those had been along mountain paths, we were not so inevitably tempted at that hour of night to be particular in a choice of roofs as Hori, who had come by train, was imagining.